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Dessert

White Mountain Cake

A cake made with butter, egg whites, sugar, flour, milk, baking powder, topped with egg white icing flavored with citric acid, alcohol, indigo, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

White Mountain Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the cake

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cream the butter until smooth.

  3. Add the egg whites and sugar, mixing well.

  4. Gradually add the flour, milk, and baking powder, mixing until combined.

  5. Divide the batter into four parts and pour into jelly cake pans.

  6. Bake until golden and a toothpick comes out clean.

Make the icing and finish

  1. Let the cakes cool completely before icing.

  2. For the icing, beat the egg whites until stiff.

  3. Dissolve the citric acid in the alcohol and add to the beaten egg whites.

  4. Gradually mix in the powdered sugar until smooth.

  5. Add a little indigo and lemon flavoring to taste.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creaming with sugar traps air and gives the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Egg whites
Provide structure and lift in the batter, and are whipped to stiff peaks for the icing.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure once its proteins set in the oven.
White sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps the cake brown and stay tender.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the cake rise and become light.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves into the whipped egg whites to make a smooth, sweet icing.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites for the icing. Egg whites must be beaten to stiff peaks before the sugar goes in. Any grease or yolk left in the bowl stops them from whipping, and under-beaten whites will collapse and make the icing runny.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, sugar, flour, milk):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, sugar, flour, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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